We started our exploration of Lisbon with a morning trip to Belém to take a look at the World Heritage site that consists of a monastery and a commemorative harbor watchtower. Together, this complex is recognized as representation of Portuguese power during the Age of Discoveries. Here is the perspective…
The third point of the Portuguese World Heritage monastic triangle, along with Alcobaça and Batalha, is the Convent of Christ in Tomar. The oldest of the three, it has been built and improved upon for several centuries; the variety of the styles in its construction came to symbolize the opening…
Our drive from Porto to Lisbon started with the rain-out in Aveiro. We had two more sightseeing stops along the way, and unfortunately we kept dragging the rain behind us everywhere we went. Thankfully, the moments of downpour alternated with periods of calm and blue skies, and in Batalha we…
Just as in Amarante, our visit to Aveiro was negatively affected by the weather, only in a more dramatic fashion. We arrived in town on a beautiful spring sunny morning, shortly after starting our exploration decided to stop by for coffee at one of the local establishments, and emerged from…
The first capital of Portugal way back in the 12th century, Guimarães is recognized on the World Heritage list as an authentic example of the evolution of a medieval settlement into a modern town. Its historic center is a homogeneous architectural ensemble in a style that is native to the…
The city of Braga did not make the final cut of our Portugal itinerary aside from one single sight on the outskirts of the town. The sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte is comparatively young for a religious site – the pilgrimage church dates only from the 17th century, and…
The village of Amarante was planned as the end-of-day stop on the return to Porto from Douro Valley – it is conveniently located along the way. Unfortunately, the weather – which was fairly benevolent to us in the first few days of our trip – picked the moment of our…
There are several properties on the World Heritage list that celebrate historic and famous wine-producing regions. My fairly well-known affinity for wine notwithstanding, I have never managed a visit to one of those sites that would actually revolve around wine. Which made our day-trip to Alto Douro the first of…
The very first adjective to use to describe Porto has to be colorful. Yes, the city has a lot of history and quite a few significant monuments and points of interest – which is the main reason why it as a whole is a World Heritage site – but it’s…
Coimbra is the fourth-largest city in Portugal, and its former capital for a bit over a century quite a few centuries ago. As any city over a thousand years old, it is not without charms, but on balance it falls short of making an exceptional impression. It is nice, but…
Our itinerary in Portugal was structured around two “hub-and-spokes” legs in Porto and Lisbon. There are roughly 300 kilometers of driving from one to another, with quite a few interesting sights in between. Seeing more than a couple of them requires more than one day. One solution to that would…
As is always the case on our family travels, should you have been following my lovely wife on social media you would have known by now that we spent a glorious week-plus in Portugal. It was our first trip to the country, so we tried to reasonably cover as many…
This is a pretty recent memory, not even a year old at the time of writing. But it is very illustrative of how the same place can be both most enchanting and most awful, depending on the time of the day. The village of Oia on the northern tip of…
This is not an exceptional photo but it occupies a special place in my memory. It was opportunistically taken from the upper deck of a bus idling by the Mansion House, looking towards the Royal Exchange. So very iconic British red double-decker is moving across the line of vision. In…
This is one of my all-time favorite photographs. It featured several years ago in one of my essays on Venice and it has a prominent spot in the slider at the top of the blog’s homepage. I am standing on the stern of a Grand Canal vaporetto that is gliding…
Spontaneity has not been much of a feature of my traveling exploits lately, but the Christmastime trip to Washington had a bit of spontaneity in it. It was originally conceived as an opportunity for moms to do things with kids, and my participation in that was vague at best. Just…
I have managed trips to 4 foreign countries over the course of 2018 (Scotland, France, Greece, Italy), of which one was a fairly triumphant first. It continued a curiously stable trend established in the last couple of years (2017, 2016) following a much higher output of 2015. Where it comes…
Our November trip to Italy was relatively short, befitting a getaway, and structured around visiting a few places that we had not explored in the past. We spent time in Milan (city highlights, Last Supper), Bergamo (city highlights, fortifications), and Turin (city highlights, royal palaces). My photographic output was not…
Why did we go to Turin in the first place? If you guessed that in addition to visiting a city that we have not been to before it gave me a chance to add to my roster of visited World Heritage sites, you would be entirely correct. Over a dozen…
My writing skills being what they are, I frequently struggle with finding original or at least not overused ways to express my positive impressions of places and points of interest. But that is nothing compared to the search for ways to describe a lukewarm impression. The places that do not…